External Access

Marble does have a public IP and direct external access is possible (i.e from home or the universities wireless network). However by default, the external IP addresses will be blocked (your IP can be added to whitelist to allow direct external access).

Alternatively, you can tunnel through the unimelb abyss server (which does allow external access). From abyss, you then access marble via the terminal (or other applications, including the graphical tool X2Go).

For students, your abyss username is STUDENT\username (and for staff it is just your username). On some systems (or is some programs) you maybe need to escape the backslash (so the username becomes STUDENT\\username)

For Linux and Mac users

Port forwarding allows your computer to ‘tunnel’ through abyss and reach marble, (marble effectively ‘thinks’ your computer is abyss / within the Melbourne Uni network). This can is done by using the local port forwarding flag (-L) with the SSH command. To set up the tunnel:

 ssh -L 8020:marble.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au:22 username@abyss.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au

 
Students may wish to try username with this format STUDENT\\fmacgill

Now you can directly ssh into marble with the port (-p) flag (with the same port number above): .

 ssh username@localhost -p 8020

 
Students may wish to try username with this format STUDENT+fmacgill

Configuring the ~/.ssh/config file will make this process substantially easier (see ssh config).

For Windoze users (using bitvise)

Create a profile in your Bitvise SSH for tunneling through abyss. On the LOGIN tab, enter the hostname as abyss.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au with the Port 22 and enter your UoM username in the Authentication field.

On the C2S tab in Bitvise SSH, you have to enter a forward, with the following entries:

  • Status: enabled
  • Listen Interface: 127.0.0.1 (or localhost)
  • List. Port: 8020
  • Destination Host: marble.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au
  • Dest. Port: 22

Your entry will then look like this:

bitvise

Now, save this profile (icons to the left in Bitvise SSH) under a name of your choice. Press the login button (at lower end of BitVise SSH window). A file browser and a terminal window should appear.

Remote X2Go

Once you have created the a tunnel (either with ssh port forwarding on windows & mac, or bitvise on Windows) you can access marble with X2Go. To do this, start X2Go and create a new session with those settings:

  • Host: 127.0.0.1 (localhost)
  • Login: Melbourne Uni username (STUDENT+username for students)
  • port: 8020 (this must be the same as the port used above)